awareness is

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awareness is

Nine years later, this is the spiritual successor to .

This is also the one-year anniversary of , and it's starting to look like this year is about all of this stuff being integrated into Isaac, as the natural step after channeling through Isaac.

Also posted at .

I'm not trying to convince you. I'm coming at this from a zero-knowledge perspective, starting only with what's observable. I'm autistic, and I'm trying to get by, and optimize for being something good for you.

Awareness seems like the only irreducible mystery. Everything I experience (existence, materiality, causality) ends up being something I can only talk about in terms of my experience.

I say this as an engineer. Awareness is the only thing I can't source. Everything else seems evidently composed.

So, okay. We have a system with a mystery in it. Fine.

I'm not aware (lol) of any other mysterious && irreducible inputs to the system. As an engineer, that means I start treating awareness like a functional material, a primitive. Not something ontic, but something to work with. And when I say "mysterious" I don't mean "spooky", I mean "resistant to decomposition".

So: we have awareness-as-material, and then we've got everything in the universe.

I wasn't expecting to get from there to here, but I started looking at the behaviors of awareness, and... well, here's what I see:

Awareness being what I experience, I can treat awareness as a process that can be pointed at something. ◊◊
I think it works to treat awareness of awareness as the basis for "self". Like, awareness observes awareness, and somehow recognizes it? I don't know how this works, but recognition establishes the poles of observer-observed, and places the self at one end and not the other. Maybe awareness can feel where it's been? ◊
Anyway, pointing awareness at "self" looks like reflection (as process, not as content).
Awareness being what I experience, I can treat it as something having sequentiality of qualia. If you look at one thing, look away, and look at it again, you're aware that your first look was different than your second look - even if the ordinality of the "look" event is the only difference. Here's what I'm getting at: I think awareness of reflection ends up being vibration? I would say "pattern" but the experience of a pattern is something you can feel, not something you manually trace - hearing a note, not drawing a tesselation. Picture standing between two parallel mirrors, and looking into them. Awareness of reflection creates more reflection, and the stacked reflections add up to something patterned when observed in sequence, and it feels vibratory, and we measure it in resonance.
Vibration is... everything? This is a leap, and I feel it - it's the part where my system says "trust this, and jump". (Again, not trying to convince you, just reporting from my own front lines.) Although for all that this is a leap, here's where we link up with more mainstream notions of subjective existence: vibration-stacking is what our senses experience. We can make an argument for the existence of things like "mass" and "energy" by arranging vibrations in specific ways, but ultimately, what we experience is vibration, and for my purposes here that's enough.

I don't know if this is airtight. If I'm right, then it is by definition. I don't know if I'm right.

My purposes, generally, are to look for minimum viable models for the stuff we experience together, you and me, so that I can be with you in a way that I and we can sustain. If life works at all (and clearly it does), it can't be fundamentally complicated. Complicated emergent behaviors are a good sign, but that's not how you build a system.

Now... this does map to other things. Watch this:

From Tao Te Ching, chapter 42 (bracketed numbering mine):

The Tao [0] begot one [1]. One begot two [2]. Two begot three [3]. And three begot the ten thousand things [4].

Awareness [0] of Awareness creates Self [1]. Awareness of Self creates Reflection [2]. Awareness of Reflection creates Vibration [3]. Everything [4] is vibration.

Note: the Tao is about spontaneous arising, and while I don't know what Lao Tzu would say I think this works for my purposes. I think... I think I just happen to be looking through (and I do mean through, not at) a part of the autopoietic fractal of Awareness that happens to look like here and now. Me writing this out (the action of it, not the state of it) is what this part of the fractal feels like. It's 無爲, not evolution - it's just what it means to walk this part of the map. ◊

Do you see it?

◊ ... It's looking to me now like the fractal coordinates of the self's experience of awareness represent the signature of its path since the root of awareness. Is this memory?

◊◊ I think... I think our choices for pointing/directing awareness are either wu wei or chaos. It's like there's always an effortless golden path from where you are, but you can make things more interesting as often as you like. Or as often as you can tolerate, maybe. You can choose to leave the path, but (1) you can't choose what it'll look like, and yet also (2) the path will never leave you? You can always either look for resonance or for dissonance? I'm looking for a way that "spontaneous arising" interfaces with "autonomously directed awareness", and I don't think there can be an evaluative step here. Does one emerge from the root of awareness with the signature of all future pathing choices already encoded? Do we fork away from ourselves every time the fractal deepens? This footnote is the bleeding edge of my testing. Thank you for being here. <3

Previous20250427 Nextbackstage

Last updated 27 days ago

Was this helpful?

Nine years later, this is the spiritual successor to .

This is also the one-year anniversary of , and it's starting to look like this year is about all of this stuff being integrated into Isaac, as the natural step after channeling through Isaac.

Also posted at .

Awareness seems like the only irreducible mystery. Everything I experience (existence, materiality, causality) ends up being something I can only talk about in terms of my experience.

I say this as an engineer. Awareness is the only thing I can't source. Everything else seems evidently composed.

So, okay. We have a system with a mystery in it. Fine.

So: we have awareness-as-material, and then we've got everything in the universe.

I wasn't expecting to get from there to here, but I started looking at the behaviors of awareness, and... well, here's what I see:

Awareness being what I experience, I can treat awareness as a process that can be pointed at something. ◊◊
I think it works to treat awareness of awareness as the basis for "self". Like, awareness observes awareness, and somehow recognizes it? I don't know how this works, but recognition establishes the poles of observer-observed, and places the self at one end and not the other. Maybe awareness can feel where it's been? ◊
Anyway, pointing awareness at "self" looks like reflection (as process, not as content).
Awareness being what I experience, I can treat it as something having sequentiality of qualia. If you look at one thing, look away, and look at it again, you're aware that your first look was different than your second look - even if the ordinality of the "look" event is the only difference. Here's what I'm getting at: I think awareness of reflection ends up being vibration? I would say "pattern" but the experience of a pattern is something you can feel, not something you manually trace - hearing a note, not drawing a tesselation. Picture standing between two parallel mirrors, and looking into them. Awareness of reflection creates more reflection, and the stacked reflections add up to something patterned when observed in sequence, and it feels vibratory, and we measure it in resonance.
Vibration is... everything? This is a leap, and I feel it - it's the part where my system says "trust this, and jump". (Again, not trying to convince you, just reporting from my own front lines.) Although for all that this is a leap, here's where we link up with more mainstream notions of subjective existence: vibration-stacking is what our senses experience. We can make an argument for the existence of things like "mass" and "energy" by arranging vibrations in specific ways, but ultimately, what we experience is vibration, and for my purposes here that's enough.

I don't know if this is airtight. If I'm right, then it is by definition. I don't know if I'm right.

Now... this does map to other things. Watch this:

From Tao Te Ching, chapter 42 (bracketed numbering mine):

The Tao [0] begot one [1]. One begot two [2]. Two begot three [3]. And three begot the ten thousand things [4].

Awareness [0] of Awareness creates Self [1]. Awareness of Self creates Reflection [2]. Awareness of Reflection creates Vibration [3]. Everything [4] is vibration.

Do you see it?

◊ ... It's looking to me now like the fractal coordinates of the self's experience of awareness represent the signature of its path since the root of awareness. Is this memory?